"THE EARTH IS TOO NEAR THE GROUND"

Farmers the world over tend to be conservative, or at least anti-collectivist, and French farm people more so than most. Yet when the French Communist Party began to lose votes in the cities, some months ago, its strength in the rural areas was still rising. Last week TIME Correspondent Andre Laguerre examined a rural area to see how the Communists were faring on the eve of next Sunday's local elections. He cabled:

The Ain is as typical a department of rural France as you could hope to find. Tucked away between Lyon and the Swiss frontier, it borrows from the north and west the lush red earth of Burgundy and the Saone valley; from the east some of the grandeur and sharp winds of the Alps; from the south some of the smiling sunniness of Provence.

"For a Richer Life." The villages in the valleys are peaceful and primitive. I stood in the main street of Belmont, which has a population of 349 souls, and looked at a red, white and blue poster. It showed a blond young giant in blue overalls holding a peasant girl by the hand; she in turn wac clasping the hand of a chubby infant. All three of them were depicted as standing in the middle of a field of corn, smiling brightly. At the foot of the poster, in great black letters, it said: "Paysans! Paysannes! Pour une vie phis riche--votes Communiste" (Men & women of the farms! For a richer life--vote Communist!).

The poster was tattered; the top right hand corner had been torn off, as if someone had tried to wrench the whole thing down, and over it had been clumsily scrawled in pencil, "Vendus comme les autres" (sold out, like the others).

The French Communist Party is on the skids. Numerically, that is; because it becomes all the more dangerous as it tends to be reduced to its hard core. But political trends in France affect the peasants about six months after they have influenced urban areas. The Communist slump is only now beginning to touch the peasant vote.

Louis Berthelot, aged 56, mayor of Belmont, offered one explanation of the temporary Communist success: "There are 190 registered votes in this commune. Fifty-six of them voted Communist at the last elections. With two or three exceptions, the 56 were all young men and women. Communism in the rural districts is the party of the faineants (lazy no-goods). Young people here don't want to work any more; they don't want to work from dawn till sunset, as I did, and my father, and my grandfather. They don't want to bend down as far as we did--the earth is too near the ground for them. They want to have the earth on the table. They vote Communist because the Communists promise them an easier life."

The Communist line to urban workers is relatively honest; it calls for more production. There is, however, a fundamentally revolting dishonesty about Communist propaganda in the countryside. It encourages the black market, incites farmers to demand highest possible prices for their goods, poisons peasant minds with insidious and repeated suggestions that townspeople are having a high old time at their expense.

The Price of Butter. One of their most influential weapons of propaganda is the weekly paper La Terre, an old, well-established agricultural paper which the Reds seized at the liberation. La Terre is unobtainable in Paris, but it sells, or distributes (many copies are given away) 300,000, copies every week in remote farms and tiny villages which are almost untouched by the Paris and big provincial daily newspapers.

La Terre cynically exploits the Communist farm line as against the city line laid down by L'Humanite of Paris. For example, L'Humanite said on Sept. 25: "In April, the Communists were in the Government, and butter cost 255 .francs a pound. Today the Communists are no longer in the Government, and butter costs 370 francs a pound. Now do you understand why you are hungry?"

In the same week La Terre said: "We are happy to note an appreciable increase in the price of milk, which rises from 9.75 to 15 francs a liter, and of butter, which is increased by 60%. Thus the authorities seem to have lent an ear to the claims we advanced on behalf of French farmers. . . . Let us hope that the new price level will become generalized for all farm products."

No politicians--not even Communists--can get away with this kind of wild double-dealing forever. In Belmont, and in thousands of Belmonts all over France, disillusion has set in. All the grip which La Terre has acquired on the peasants, all the attractiveness of hardbitten, fast-talking Communist farmer Deputies will not prevent the party from losing hundreds of thousands of rural votes at the Oct. 19 elections.

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